Higher education and high intellectual unemployment: does education matter? An interpretation and some critical perspectives

It analyses the reasons for the increasing importance paid to knowledge and education, proposing an interpretation that relies on structural changes in the world economy. Starting from the fact that some western countries, like Italy, register the highest level of unemployment between the young and highly educated workers; taking the Italian case as an example and on the basis of new epistemological premises about the concept of “knowledge”, this paper intends to provide an interpretation of this apparent contradiction of very high unemployment of “knowledge workers” in the “knowledge economy” and to provide some critical perspectives for higher education policies.